


As Is

by AudreyV



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Complicated Relationships, F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 07:35:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9168685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AudreyV/pseuds/AudreyV
Summary: Over the years Frank had come to understand Bonnie not as one woman but as dozens.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Did I really just use an iconic Ani DiFranco song as the title of a het fic?
> 
> I guess a compelling, fucked-up love story transcends all else for me. 
> 
> I'll be in the corner reciting my 20 Hail Ellens and thinking about what I've done. (In my defense, this Bonnie is still queer AF.)

Over the years Frank had come to understand Bonnie not as one woman but as dozens. There were Bonnies who loved him, others that loathed him. (There were Bonnies in both groups who wanted him.)

Some Bonnies he made love to. Others he fucked. Still others he just drank with, laughed with, teased like he was their jerk older brother. Other men might not have been able to weather the shifts, but part of Frank liked that they could be so many different things to each other.

Sometimes Bonnie appeared at his door late at night. If he was alone he’d let her in right away. If he wasn't, he'd ask her to go grab them a bottle of something at the state store. While she was gone Frank would hastily evict the current occupant of his bed and change the sheets. Then Bonnie would return, empty-handed, and let herself in. (He didn't give women keys to his place, but one night she turned to him and said, “Where’s your spare key?” like it was a foregone conclusion that he’d give it to her. “Don't worry, we’ll work it out so I won't walk in on you screwing someone else,” she added, and he believed her enough to get it from the drawer in the kitchen. A few days later she gave him a new spare that she'd had cut, and that was that.)

***

Some nights he had to tread carefully because he wasn't sure which Bonnie he was getting. One might want him to take her hard up against a wall; another would shatter if he did that. There was a Bonnie who wanted to look into his eyes as he slowly, gently thrust into her, and another who pressed her face into a pillow but insisted he keep going. Eventually Frank learned to tell them apart, although he couldn’t explain quite how.

***

There was an aggressive Bonnie who’d kneel at his feet and yank his pants down. She mostly showed up when she was pissed at Annalise, an uncomfortable truth Frank tried to ignore. (He suspected that particular fiery-eyed Bonnie sometimes knelt at Annalise’s feet too, but he didn't want to know for sure and she was considerate enough not to tell him.

***

One delicate Bonnie only appeared on certain days of the year: her birthday, Christmas Eve, the Fourth of July, and a day in early October that Frank didn't learn the significance of for a long time. He hated that Bonnie the first few times she laid next to him, quiet and tense, but eventually he realized he only hated that she hurt. After that, he felt odd swells of pride when he folded her in his arms, shielding her from the demons that pounded at the door and soothing the ones that struggled in her head.

***

Once (one time too many, if he was being honest) they were careless, so there was a Bonnie who might have had his baby. He told her he'd back her up no matter what she decided, but in the end it wasn't her decision to make. That night he knocked on her door holding soup and a bottle of bourbon.

“I should feel relieved,” she mumbled a few hours later. Frank had his feet up on the coffee table and Bonnie’s head was in his lap. He stroked her hair and reached for the bottle.

“Fuck should,” he told that quiet, pale Bonnie. “You feel how you feel.”

***

One of his favorite Bonnies squirmed with want as he described the sounds his other conquests made when he pushed his cock into them or how they tasted when he got them off with his mouth.

Once that Bonnie showed up drunk with a similarly drunk brunette stranger in tow, looking like a cat laying a gift at its master’s feet. Frank thought he’d need to lead the encounter, but Bonnie wasted no time. She stripped the girl naked and pushed her onto the bed, then turned to Frank and said, “Teach me.”

Threesomes were hit or miss in Frank’s experience. He would have called that one a complete success, but after the girl left, Bonnie spun out. Tears ran down her face as she wondered aloud if wanting to fuck women was just another consequence of what had been done to her.

“Well, nothing like that happened to me, and I love fucking women,” Frank said. She laughed and wiped her cheek on his t-shirt. Later that night her cheeks flushed red when he told her it took him six months to get good enough to get a chick off with his mouth. “Luckily I’m used to you being better at shit than me,” he joked, and the smile that lit up her face made him feel invincible.

The next time, that Bonnie took him to a bar and let him pick the girl. “She’d look good begging you to let her come,” he said and Bonnie dragged him into the bathroom, unzipped his pants and hiked up her skirt.

***

Frank wasn't sure how he felt about the kinky, experimental Bonnie, the one who didn't flinch as she confessed her darkest desires to him. He did what she asked him to, always— held her down, slapped her across the face, hissed filthy things in her ear. (Some of the other things that Bonnie wanted him to do to her made his stomach lurch, but she accepted the most fucked up things about him, so he did the same.)

Twice that Bonnie took his hands and wrapped them around her throat. Once years before Lila, and once after she knew what he'd done. Both times Frank’s cock grew painfully hard as he watched her struggle underneath him, but the second time he knew he didn’t have to be ashamed of it.

  
***

Frank wasn't naive. He knew good things were usually fleeting, so he wasn't surprised when they changed. A quiet, secretive Bonnie emerged. Frank saw the way she smiled at Sam and it made him want to shake her. He didn't, because that Bonnie was a stranger.

The Bonnie who knelt at his feet disappeared. He knew she’d made her choice, and she'd always loved Annalise more.

He still sometimes opened the door to find a Bonnie who wanted to fuck him, or to fuck someone else with him. Then the new batch of L1s arrived. One night she knocked at his door and Frank wouldn't rush Laurel out to make space for that Bonnie in his bed. The next day he found her key in an envelope on his desk, and that was that.

***

There were fewer Bonnies in his life after that. A critical Bonnie who resented him for fucking the students. An insecure, mousy Bonnie who took Annalise’s abuse like it was a gift. A Bonnie who hated him for lying to her about Sam.

It didn't matter. He let her be as many or as few versions of herself as she needed to be. In time, Bonnie his sarcastic drinking buddy returned. Bonnie his closest friend followed soon after. (The Bonnie who whispered she loved him the day after she lost their baby stayed gone. It was for the best, even if Frank’s chest got tight and hot when he saw echoes of her in whatever Bonnie was in front of him.)

***

Frank started to understand her when the house of cards he’d built crashed down around him. The Frank who told Laurel he’d killed Lila was a different Frank than the one who drank in the basement with Bonnie and ignored the part of himself that wanted to kiss her. They were both different than the Frank who shaved his beard and head after he shot Wallace Mahoney.

Staring at a stranger's face in the mirror, he wondered if she'd ever gotten used to the drastic shifts inside her, or if she'd just learned to ride them out.

In a series of cheap motel rooms, Frank stared at the ceiling and wanted a Bonnie, any Bonnie, there beside him. (He knew which one he would have picked, but even one of the ones who hated him would have been a comfort.)

***

In early October he pushed away the thought of Bonnie’s most vulnerable self fighting her demons alone. He thought maybe he loved her when he realized he hoped she was safe in someone else's arms. He knew it for sure later that day when he killed the man who gave her those demons in the first place.

The Bonnie who showed up at the funeral home was familiar and strange at the same time. She looked at him like he was a different Frank, and she was right.

That night, a Frank who loved her more than he could say felt the warmth of her body next to his. He didn't want to take advantage but that Frank was weak and selfish.

Almost as weak and selfish as the Frank who left her there without a word the next morning.

***

He resolved to go home a different man, so it was a hesitant Frank who got on his knees to beg her forgiveness. (And a broken Frank who a cold, hurt Bonnie sent away.)

It was that Frank who pressed the cold barrel of a gun to his head. He hated himself enough to do it, but he loved the Bonnie who took the weapon from his hands just a little more.

That Bonnie took him home with her. She got him a drink and wrapped him in her arms. He sobbed in her lap, told her she should have let him die.

“Fuck should,” she said vehemently, and he remembered.


End file.
